Excerpt from The Library
“Sit down,” №5 ordered, “you’re late for class.”
‘What class?’ Gwen looked around and saw everybody was sitting in a semicircle around the speaker, ostensibly to attend class.
“Just sit!” №5 rolled his eyes, displeased by the time wasting.
№4 and №1 scooted over to make room for her. By means unknown, someone had produced a notepad and a pencil, sharpened to a fine point, and the two implements were now getting passed around the group until they reached her.
“What exactly am I supposed to do with these?” she whispered towards №4, trying to disturb the assembly as little as possible, but the latter looked annoyed by the interruption and didn’t answer.
She sat herself down quietly between the two numbers, notepad in her lap.
“What’s the class about?” she leaned over to whisper in №4’s ear again, undeterred by the latter’s cold shoulder.
“The afterlife,” he answered curtly.
“The what?”
“Shhh!”
“Do you have anything to contribute?” №5 asked her directly, trying to put this class disturbance to good use.
“I believe I do, yes.”
“Oh, you do, do you? How? Have you been? By all means, enlighten us!”
“№5!”
The latter waved off the protest with a bored hand gesture and signaled her to continue.
“Are we in agreement about the existence of the unconscious?”
“As opposed to…” №5 retorted.
“Human consciousness being consigned only to the rational realm.”
“We reluctantly acknowledge the unconscious,” №5 frowned. “If for no other reason than that it makes itself manifest all too frequently, and always in the negative.”
“Then you may consider the possibility that the collective unconscious exists as well,” Gwen continued.
“No! No! Absolutely not!” №5 got instantly infuriated. “We’re not even going to discuss this nonsense!”
“It’s not nonsense,” №6 protested. “Just because you have an opinion about it…”
“It’s not an opinion! The Easter Bunny isn’t real either!”
“By that logic, neither is love!”
“We know that for a fact!”
“So,” №1 intervened, “love does not exist. Remind me to save you a seat at the Diogenes’ club.” He turned towards Gwen and added. “Which reminds me to tell you your generation did not invent youthful rebellion. It’s as old as time.”
“Even more proof the collective unconscious exists,” №6 added with an ironic smile.
“Let’s allow her to finish her argument, shall we?” №3 pleaded.
“That’s right, we’re going to teach her rhetoric and debate by starting with false premises!” №5 brooded.
“Continue, my dear,” №4 turned towards Gwen.
‘Why are you taking a rhetoric class?’ she mused.
The group burst instantly into Homeric laughter that lasted for quite some time, during which she tried to make herself small and inconspicuous, but good luck trying to hide anything taller than a rock in the desert.
When the laughter finally subsided, №3 replied.
“We’re not taking the class, silly! We ARE the class!”
“Continue your argument, please,” №4 reminded her.
Gwen was already parboiled in her own sweat and had as much confidence as a worm on a hook, but she continued, wretched.
“If we accept the existence of the collective unconscious, what is the difference between it and the ever after? Both of them imply human consciousness enduring outside of time and in the absence of a physical vessel.”
“Liquified and blended together like a smoothie too, brrr!” №5 shuddered, appalled.
“Ok,” №1 calmed down the outraged audience with a hand gesture. “So, suppose we’re all Soylent Green. What of it?”
“Forget the collective unconscious! By that logic we should be more concerned about whether individual consciousness exists!” №5 protested.
“Speak for yourself!”
“I would. If only that were possible!”
“We’re all over the place! Can we follow this argument to its natural end without leaving the solar system, please?”
“Ok,” №5 turned to Gwen again. “Say your analogy is true. Why should we care?”
“If there was such a thing as consciousness independent of the body, wouldn’t you want to know?”
“But there is no such thing as consciousness independent of the body.”
“Or love,” №6 mumbled resentfully under his breath.
“Let’s say I believe you. Why should I care?”
“Because that knowledge determines how you decide to live your life.”
“That’s precisely the reason this fairy tale makes my blood boil! Think you’ll live forever, why don’t you! Maybe you won’t have to take responsibility for your earthly life.”
“That’s not at all the point,” Gwen replied, surprised at her own assertiveness. “What if you knew with absolute certainty?”
“Then, from what you just told me, I die and get turned into a smoothie, with №6 and №3 over there, and you won’t be able to tell us apart! Cursed to have the debate about the existence of the collective unconscious for all eternity! The horror!”
‘Why are we talking about this again?’ Gwen wondered.
“To teach you how to formulate an argument,” №5 replied out loud to remind her.
‘How on earth does he do that?’
“I’m psychic,” №5 rebuked her.
Gwen sulked, but №1 prodded her to continue her argument.
“Not only there is such a thing as a collective unconscious, but it has a designated pronoun: the impersonal it, or on in French, which is often used to represent the unseen entity we all unconsciously feel and accept as existing, the one which embodies realities and laws we don’t have the means to express. When it presents in the negative, we see it as a menacing collective. We personify it into a they, to bring it down to human scale and make ourselves its equal.”
“It is already human, by your own argument,” №5 replied.
“Probably,” Gwen hesitated.
“It would be hard to equate an amorphous collective running into the billions with one human being.”
“So, we’ve an ant colony?”
“More like an ocean, with currents and deeps and a glimmering surface.”
“I still don’t understand why would that have anything to do with life everlasting.”
“If consciousness can exist independent of the body, why would it be necessary for any of it to be currently incarnate in order to project into thought?”
“You mean we’re talking to dead people.”
“Among other things.”
“Do tell!” №5 leaned in, vastly amused. “Wait. I’ve got to sit down for this one. You were saying?”
“We may be talking to many things: fragments of individual consciousnesses, blends and composites, consciousnesses not currently assigned to a physical body, archetypal repositories which rose to the symbolic level, our own consciousness, reflected and making waves in the ocean, echoes from different times, contagious memes,” Gwen enumerated.
“I’m still waiting to hear where the dead come into this argument.”
“I’m saying you can’t tell how the comprising water molecules of that ocean came about. Maybe some of them evaporated, reached the cold layers of the higher atmosphere and rained back into it. It’s a continuum.”
“What logically follows from this is we’re only blessed with the rejects!” №5 burst into laughter. He was laughing so hard tears were streaming down his face.
“That’s not what I meant!” Gwen protested most vehemently.
He gestured towards her to stop, unable to pause for breath between the bouts of laughter. It took a while for him to regain composure.
“Congratulations, my dear! This is the most ludicrous tall tale I ever heard in my life, but also the most entertaining. I see now the notepad was a premature move. By all means, do not write any of this down! We’ll scrap this entire argument and start from scratch.”
“So, no supernatural entities, then?” №1 inquired, visibly amused.
“Those are still up in the cloud,” №4 replied, starting bout of laughter number three.
Gwen was beet red and looking desperately for a hole in the ground she could crawl in and disappear.
“Don’t worry,” №4 comforted her. “Between the agave and the hemp, we’ve heard much worse. Heck, we’ve said much worse. Drink?” he offered her a flask.
“It’s not even four in the afternoon!”
“So?”
She was going to add on which day and suddenly realized she didn’t know. She tried to count down the days to the last one she remembered, but the days blended into each other so much they made counting impossible.
This place looked very real, as did her companions, but there was something about it, something that defied causality and logic that she couldn’t pinpoint.
‘Maybe I died,’ she considered the option.
It wouldn’t have been outside the realm of possibility, it was certainly more likely than the improbable luck of finding a house and people in the middle of nowhere, perfectly isolated from the world, after roaming through the desert for three days, lost, without food and water.
“And you subsequently condensed and rained back down on us,” №1 mocked. “At least you fell in the desert, where you’re needed.”
“Fell?”
“Well, yes. Last I checked, gravity was still working.”
“Fell from where?” Gwen was overcome with dread, suddenly and without a reason.
“Don’t push her, №1! She’s going to have a panic attack and think she fell from grace any moment now.”
“Oh, come on! I never had so much fun in my life!”
‘Who are you people?’
“Your fellow fallen, no doubt,” №7 joined in the teasing. “Here to corrupt your young mind.”
“We are The Library!”
“The Library!”
‘Oh, God! Not the Greek chorus thing again!’
They joined hands and circled around her in a slow dance. Their expressions were frozen on their faces, turning them into stone statues, a strange vision which made the hair on the back of her head stand on end.
Stuck in the middle of the circle as an idol stand-in, Gwen wasn’t even surprised when she saw the clouds starting to pile up into the distance, weird disk shaped clouds, darker and heavier than lead, and looking pregnant with rain.
‘It’s going to rain any moment now!’
“The more the merrier! One consciousness drop. Two consciousness drops. Many consciousness drops.”
She smiled, excited to get the answer to her earlier question about what day it was.
As evident from the gathering of clouds on the horizon, it was Tuesday.
